In the wake of the Florida school shooting it seems that the gun control laws are in the spotlight again. And so are violent video games, in what a cynic might think is an attempt to shift the blame to an area that’s not directly funding the Republican Party.

Still, cynicism aside, it is worth asking the question of whether video games are training our kids to be killers in a fair and objective manner, even if the common sense approach might be to think that participating in video game related violence might at best desensitise one to violence, at worst lead one to act out the content of a violent game. Common sense is all very well but it really does need to be backed up and supported by empirical research if we’re going to base policy on it.

This is the cherry picked highlight reel of violence in video games that the White House put together. I would strongly suggest if you are of a squeamish disposition do not watch it. View Full Post

Now I’m facing my fears with the help of AXA PPP healthcare, I’m actually facing my fears with help from AXA PPP healthcare– I spent an hour on the telephone with one of their physiologists who is also a mental health first aider. It’s all very well girding your loins and setting your goals but sometimes you need a bit of help in facing, what many perceive to be, the peril. In this instance, my peril, in inverted commas, is the fear that I’ll have a premature death and leave my family to cope without a dad or husband (the kids without a dad, my wife without a husband before you get any funny ideas). Rather than thinking of this fear as a peril, I can harness it positively, by taking steps to improve my fitness and with a healthier diet. Unlike Sir Galahad, who obviously needed no help facing the peril:

Lancelot:You were in great peril. Galahad: I don’t think I was. Lancelot: Yes, you were. You were in terrible peril. Galahad: Look, let me go back in there and face the peril. Lancelot: No, it’s far too perilous. Galahad: Look, it’s my duty as a knight to sample as much peril as I can.

If there’s one thing I’m never backwards in coming forward about it’s talking about myself and the AXA professional Becky was super awesome in focusing the Alex stream of consciousness into the areas that needed it the most. In fact by the end of our session I was in full on Galahad mode and wanting to face the peril, no matter how perilous. It’s funny how some external input can really help you harness the positive potential of those fears full on isn’t it?

We worked through my issues, which were a mixture of diet, exercise and a lot of apathy, and Becky came up with a three point plan:

Reduce weight to less than 100kg – as you mentioned breaking this number is a big barrier psychologically. Don’t forget you have already dropped a trouser size through the addition of walking to work so you are well on your way to achieving this.

Increase activity level, keep up with football and walking to work but build core strength too. Could you link this with the children as supports, just like running with your 9 year old, could you find an activity to do with the others once a week too?

Improve the quality of your diet, specifically lunches when you are away from your wife. Don’t worry too much about calories, let’s look into nutritious rich foods. Take leftover dinners to work or cook yourself something – don’t forget you enjoy cooking so hopefully this will be a positive aspect of routine rather than a chore. Planning is key here!

Right now my knees are aching something rotten; I played five a side last night and by the end of it was really beginning to suffer (I am 43 and overweight!) but I was still out today racking up the steps. And while steps don’t mean prizes, they do mean kilometres, and in the long run the prize is conquering my fear of an early departure from this mortal life, so I suppose it is a prize in a way. I walked to work so fast on Tuesday that the GPS assisted activity tracker I was using categorised it as a run rather than walking! Every time I feel like dawdling on my walk to work, I think about lying in bed worrying how my kids would cope with everyday growing up milestones- transitioning to secondary school, sitting their GCSEs, getting a first girlfriend or boyfriend- without me there to help them along the way. To be honest it’s still very easy to lay awake at night with those worries but I am at least utilising that fear to drive me on to a healthier me.

I was particularly impressed with some of the tools and resources AXA PPP healthcare gave me to help with this progress. There is a great resource called Food for Thought that Becky emailed me that not only did the normal sort of “eat brown bread because it’s better for you” jazz, but also had a mood & food diary, with specific minerals and foodstuffs that could help improve your state of mind. I never knew that processing alcohol, your body uses thiamin, zinc and other nutrients and this can deplete your reserves, especially if your diet is poor.

After my first hour consultation, I get 20 minutes a month to catch up to make sure I’m still on track. This weekend, I’m following advice and taking the kids for an excessively long cross country hike followed by a nice swim to warm us all up!

To find out how fears can hold us back and watch a video by leading psychologist, Dr Mark Winwood, about ‘How to set your fear’ so you can turn it into a motivating tool, visit AXA PPP healthcare’s Own Your Fears website: www.axappphealthcare.co.uk/ownyourfears.

This summer Nozstock: The Hidden Valley celebrates its 20th anniversary, entering a small group of festivals who have reached two decades of creating magic each summer. It’s a huge achievement for the family-fun festival which is set across their working farm in the rolling hills of Herefordshire. It is an event which has grown from a group of like-minded friends gathered together many years ago into a truly mesmeric experience of wonder and enchantment for all the ages, including the return of the Little Wonderland Kids’ Area – a huge family favourite.

Nozstock The Hidden Valley’s Little Wonderland Kids’ Area features a vibrant spectrum of children’s entertainment for everyone to enjoy, which will be linked into this year’s theme of Nozstalgia. The festival embraces a whole family festival experience from beginning to end, and this is a friendly welcoming environment for both parents and little ones alike. All are welcome to get creative, be amazed by wondrous stories, sculptures and entertainment, or roll their sleeves up for some physical fun. All eventsand activities are free of charge in the Little Wonderland Kids’ Area across the whole weekend, as thefestival always strongly believes families shouldn’t foot the bill for festival fun. There’s even a bottle warming service!

Click for bigger

Ella Nosworthy, who runs Nozstock with her father, says: “No-one is more surprised than us that we’ve made it to our 20th birthday! We’re planning our biggest show ever to make it a real celebration, and we’re sure that anyone who has been to the festival will not want to miss this summer! We’ve bought back some of our favourite and most memorable artists from the past 20 years. Our Nozstalgia theme is whatever you feel fond about from the past. There’s lots of inspiration to get really creative!”

The Nozstock team are incredibly proud to be revealing the first round of artists joining them for their momentous birthday celebrations. As ever, it’s a kaleidoscopic mix of headline names, up and coming talent and seasoned stars forming an incredible range of styles across the event’s ten intimate stages. Headlining The Orchard, electronic floor fillers Chase & Status are one of the most successful acts associated with drum and bass, with multi-platinum albums, numerous charting singles, and working with the likes of Rihanna. Electronic pop duo Goldfrapp are an enchanting force, releasing iridescent, intriguing pop since 1999 across 7 highly respected albums. The Selecter are a 2-Tone ska band featuring a racially diverse and politically charged line-up, whilst over a 20-year career the Dub Pistols have worked with heroes like The Specials and Madness. Electric Swing Circus is a 6-strong fusion of saucy 20s swing and stomping electro beats, and The Lovely Eggs are a lo-fi psychedelic punk rock band. Next up are the The Stiff Joints, a 10-piece ska army with a raucous infusion of ska, punk and reggae, and as Oh My God! It’s The Church encourage all sinners to join them, Mr Tea and The Minions bring their gypsy flavoured ska and swing. Mad Apple Circus is an original blend of horn-fuelled styles and Buffo’s Wake are gypsy punk lunatics with a taste for the macabre.

Over in The Garden, rap royalty Grandmaster Flash was a member of his ground-breaking hip-hop group with the Furious Five and developed never heard before turntable techniques; he brings his incredible party-rocking acumen to the stage. Speaking of legends, Chali 2na MC, painter and founding member of hip-hop supergroup Jurassic 5 returns to The Garden alongside Krafty Kutz; the multi award-winning DJ and undisputed King of Breaks. Nozstock fave DJ Marky has worked with Madonna, and Fatboy Slim as well as releasing his own albums fusing drum and bass with full-tilt club beats and laid-back house grooves, and hip-hop duo Taskforce bring street stories and psychedelic flows, whilst living legends Verb T and Pitch 92 will bring an odyssey in rhyme and funk. The dextrous lyricist and M.C of High Focus Records, Fliptrix brings his seamless semantics, Serial Killaz are drum and bass jungle producers signed to Playaz Recordings and London reggae artist Kiko Bun is surfing a dubby resurgence all the way to the top. Not forgetting Pengshui, made up of hip-hop heavyweights Illaman, Fatty Bassman &amp; Prav. The festival’s birthday celebrations will hit their peak with Saturday nights ska and skank party, headlined by Macka B, who after 30 years continues to tour the world and break down barriers and with Sunday’s special 20 th anniversary drum ‘n’ bass party.

At The Bandstand Frauds are a post-hardcore band, whilst Average Sex have been snapped up by Tim Burgess& label O Genesis Recordings. Elephants’ Grave stars Sonny Wharton; a firm fixture in the house and techno scene, whilst Dom Kane’s tracks have been supported by Pete Tong, Deadmau5, and more. Dirty Secretz is one of house music & most exciting artists, releasing on Stealth and Whartone Records. Friday nights welcomes Pro-Ject, providing the true house grooves, whilst in the daytime Ital Sounds reggae collective are ready to provide the rocksteady rhythms.

The Cabinet of Lost Secrets features 7Suns’ music in an energizing blend of Afro, Latin, Caribbean, funk, jazz and rock, The Pink Diamond Revue are an electro-punk duo who play in front of a big screen projecting images they have cut up themselves from old B-movies, and Collective 43 are a multi- instrumental congregation steeped heavy with New Orleans-street style and twists of blues and jazz. And across the site there’s plenty more to choose from. Phil Kay’s unpredictable and freestyle approach won him a Perrier nomination in 1993 and the award for best stand-up at the 1994 British Comedy Awards, and Jayde Adams is a multi-faceted comedian of hilarious repute. The Wrong Directions Cinetent is hosted by local experimental collective MASH Cinema, whilst The Sunken Yard are connoisseurs of a very good time indeed. Puppetual Motion present a wide variety of visually stunning aerial acts and Hummadruz are an ultra-violet theatre group dedicated to performing astonishing psychedelic spectacle. Andrew Szydlo brings chemistry to life with his spectacular demonstrations, whilst the fabulous Little Wonderland Kids Area keeps children of all ages enraptured throughout the whole weekend. A new and improved Craft Area wows with a chance to learn from the masters. Workshops on offer include blacksmithing, spoon carving and plant propagation plus amazing demonstrations and communal sculpture building with a fiery destiny…

Tickets from £120 for adults / from £95 for 13-16 year olds / 12 and under free / Booking fees apply /

I’m late with this review and the reason behind it is a bit silly. Catan just sort of looks intimidating. As someone who never really board gamed past the classics like Cluedo and Monopoly, even I’d heard of Catan because it’s such a big deal. From what I’d heard it’s a game that’s best with 4 players and can take around an hour and a half to play. That sounded a bit intimidating but I wish I’d not seen it as that because once we cracked it open with some chums, the game time just flowed by and we were all sad it was over; pulling out our phones to try and work out when we could schedule another game (pro tip- you can fit a game in during the average run time of a kids movie, even allowing for the interruptions down to complaints like “he looked at me funny”, or “he’s sitting on my private sofa”).

Catan comes with one of the best instructions booklets I’ve seen. Everything is illustrated with pictures, so there’s none of the usual Alex process of struggling to pick out the right meaning (I’m terrible following instructions- to me if a car says it needs servicing at either 10,000 miles or 12 months, I’d have it serviced when it hit 10,000 miles at 14 months).

The Catan board is a bit of a novelty, made up of large hexagons. Or is that hexagonal pieces? I’m going to stick with hexagons as it’s easier to type. Each hexagon is a different type of land, and every time you play they go together in a unique order, which gives the game a lot of variety. Each hexagon has different attributes assigned by a number between one and twelve, omitting seven, which is kept apart for something more sinister! We used the beginners set up, which sees each of the 19 hexagons (aside from the desert) given a number. Some numbers appear more than once, which comes into play when rolling the dice later in the game (it’s all to do with the probability of rolling certain numbers you see).

The Catan board fits together nicely as you can see from the game we played the other night:

Thankfully the blue sea border slots together nicely and makes it easy to put together, as well as being stable on a table.

Initially I felt a bit overwhelmed by the set up of Catan; there is a lot to do and think about, hexagons, numbers, villages, roads, resources and the Robber who starts off in the centre and moves whenever someone rolls a 7. But perhaps surprisingly, Catan is really easy to play for beginners. Each turn involves a roll of two dice, anyone who has a village (or later a city) adjacent to a hexagon with that number in it gets a resource card with the material shown in the hexagon. Using the above as an example, if I’d rolled a twelve, white (me) would get two crop resource cards as I have two villages next to the hexagon with a 12 in it. If other players have settlements around a rolled number, they also get resource cards, regardless of whether they rolled the dice or not.

The game is about resource management basically, trading cards for roads and villages and cities, you can also trade cards with other players when it’s your go. Being captain obstinate, nobody would trade with me as I was winning but I didn’t let that stop me!

The aim of Catan is to collect 10 valour points (each settlement type you can build gets you a certain number, as does having the longest road and the most knights). This effectively puts a timer on a game that is pretty open ended but it’s still not a quick game to play. Our first couple of outings with only three players still took almost and hour and a half (with constant tea rounds contributing to the running time no doubt).

Catan is easily the best game that I’ve discovered on my journey with the Board Game Club. It’s simple to set up, despite all the components, and allows for great interaction between the players. The ability to randomly place the hexagons makes for an almost unlimited landscape and the player interaction via bartering makes for an interesting twist too. This is a game that works as well over a couple of bottles of wine as it does several rounds of tea. It’s really great fun!

You can buy Catan from all good retailers, it’s RRP if £44.99, Amazon currently have it for £35.99.

It’s a universally held fact that music was better in the day. It doesn’t matter which day you’re talking about, it was just better. Our parents complained about the rubbish we listened to, and no doubt their parents did too, just as we think most of the guff our kids generation is in to is rubbish.

So, over dinner the other night, preempting the 10 year old’s any questions session, where he likes to go round the table and ask people an either/or question, I decided to ask the kids what their favourite song was.

The boy, aged 10

I was impressed. I thought he might go for some Nerdest (they do songs based on videogames and are particularly popular on YouTube) or some bloke in a white suit with a plastic bin on his head called Marshmello but he actually picked Wonderwall by Oasis. Wonderwall is 23 years old now, and if a ten year old me had to pick a 23 year old song, it would have been from 1962 and probably If I had a Hammer by Peter Paul and Mary.

Fifi, aged 9

I have to admit I had no idea what to expect from my daughter. She quite often puts on My Old Man’s a Dustman by Lonnie Donegan, and does a little dance to it. Equally she likes current pop and rock. She initially gave one song but then changed it to another, so I’m going to include both here.

Dido I can deal with in the sense that it’s a nice song. Bobby Vee’s Night of a Thousand Eyes though?! It turns out her granddad gave her an iPod Shuffle that had both songs on it and those are the two that she really liked. How awesome is that? Not least because the Bobby Vee video is a bit bonkers.

Ned, aged 6

Although Ned has now progressed to the “confident reader, aged 5-8” section of Waterstones, getting things like song titles out of him still remains a challenge. And it was no different here as his choice was “the song with an elephant in the video”. That doesn’t narrow it down much, so we had to fire up the TV and let him browse the YouTube music videos. Just as well we did as I’m not entirely sure we’d have got to Paradise by Coldplay on our own.

There is something very cool about hearing a 6 year old sing along to pop songs.

The runners up

We spent the rest of the evening playing our favourite songs on YouTube, taking it in turns to pick a song out and make everyone else listen to it.

The kids came up with some great songs:

Bastille by Pompeii (or the aaaa,aaaa,aaaa song as Ned calls it)

Symphony of Destruction by Megadeth (the boy was born to this, it’s his anthem)

Wolves by Selma Gomez and Marshmello

The Chain by Fleetwood Mac

All the Small Things by Blink 182

And we had an entire evening without television!

The best thing about the whole impromptu music evening was the lack of really contemporary music, because lets face it, music today is rubbish…

We went to the Royal Opera House to see some ballet at the weekend and I thought I’d share my top tips in case you want to seem some exciting ballet yourself as part of a programme of self improvement and culture. We love culture in our house, we’ve dragged the kids round more museums, galleries and theatres than you could shake a stick at in a no doubt stylised ritualistic fashion, and they’re even beginning to enjoy it now.

So without further ado, these are my top tips for attending the ballet with your children. Or without them, it’s entirely up to you. It’s cheaper if you leave them with their grandparents. Should that be a tip? Who knows…

If you have vertigo, don’t book the upper slips. They might be (relatively) cheap but if you have to spend two hours feeling the clarion call of the void pulling you towards a long drop to oblivion, it’s probably not worth it.

Take the time to find out how the ballet you’re attending is pronounced. For example Giselle isn’t pronounced like chisel and you’ll get some funny looks if you repeatedly get it wrong in front of people who aren’t in the cheap seats.

Take some time before you go to read up on the story. Ballet is at best interpretive dance and at worst just people prancing around on a set. What they dance doesn’t give much away of what is actually happening and I’ve yet to decode what a chap jumping up with his arms by his side, scissoring his legs frenetically actually means in the context of story/emotion or anything else.

Ensure you find out where all the toilets are and make sure any accompanying children have been toileted three or four times before the ballet starts. The seats are quite closely packed and the amount of tutting that will ensue if you have to get up during part of the performance is astonishing but rest assured, if you do have to go out, you won’t miss anything critical to your understanding of the story; it’ll just be some prancing about and funny jumping, which whilst nice isn’t critical to your enjoyment as the whole thing is made up of prancing about and funny jumping.

The ladies doing ballet get to do all the cool stuff and the men look a bit daft. All the chaps get to do is the aforementioned jumpy thing (like a posher form of Riverdance), some long strides and a few lifts. The ladies get to do all the spinning around, graceful jumping and stand with their leading foot at a funny angle.

The ballet we saw was around 100 minutes (with an interval in the middle), followed by about 2 hours of applause and bowing, presumably on a pre-agreed rota to give the performers a chance for a cup of tea or a wee, which meant that the troupe had about 45 seconds before they had to do the performance all over again for the next bunch of punters. Try to moderate your applause or your hands will sting and you’ll swear all you can hear is clapping for the rest of the day.

We had a lovely time, even if Ned, 6, asked in a loud whisper at one point when were they going to start talking because he couldn’t work out what was happening. There is also a nice sandwich shop round the corner that’s good for lunch.

Up until now I don’t doubt that the Xbox ecosystem has been much better than Sony’s Playstation set up when it comes to parental controls for kids using their own profiles. This is however about to change quite dramatically, you can read the full details of this change and all the others, in the following PS blog:

Play Time Management

We’re introducing Play Time Management, which will allow family managers (and adult family members who are set as guardians) to manage PS4 playtime for child family members on family on PSN. Managing Playtime is easy; go to Settings > Family Management on your PS4, or log into your PlayStation account on your web browser from your PC or smartphone, to check and manage your child’s playtime each day. If needed, the family manager/guardians can apply playtime restrictions to make sure that the child is only playing for a set amount of time or within set playable hours. Notifications on PS4 will be sent to the child during gameplay so that he or she knows when they should save and quit. The family managers/guardians also have the option to add extra game time via their smartphone or PC. In addition, the family manager/guardians can choose whether or not to automatically log the child out of their PS4 once their playtime is over.

This is big news for parents, and finally lets us exercise the sort of control over access without it coming down to a fight every single time.

Heck, my most sure fire way of ensuring my eldest gets ready for bed usually involves me messaging him on the PS4 via the Playstation app on my phone, so the addition of another weapon to my arsenal that he can’t actually completely ignore is only a good thing.

The PS4 already has some good age related restrictions but being able to set time limits per day is a real killer function, even though I can see it leading to some tears and arguments. It’s a heck of a lot better than stealing the controllers and hiding them somewhere (and forgetting where you put them)!

MS already have a family timer on the Xbox One, so now I just have to decide the split between the two for the kids…

Whether it’s Christmas Day spent putting triple As into toys that will only be used over the Christmas period, my smartphone battery anxiety as I head out for the evening with only 35% charge left, I’m increasingly becoming a slave to batteries. Even my watch needs charging every couple of days for goodness sake.

I’m spending a couple of hours out this morning, going straight from extra maths for the boy to guitar for Fifi. I had my laptop with me, left on to charge overnight, so I could catch up on some email, do some admin and done writing. Except that the wall switch wasn’t turned on so I was faced with 3% battery and a morning off sitting around twiddling on my phone. It’s not the end of the world but it’s a waste of a couple of hours where I can guarantee that I can’t feel guilty about what I should be doing and won’t be interrupted by kids.

Battery technology hasn’t improved inline with other technology. This has led to a lot of technology starting to stagnant in terms of actual processing power as they focus on keeping the power level constant while improving the battery life. I’m a heavy tech user and on a “bad” day I’ll need to charge my phone mid afternoon, despite every mainstream review saying that they get a day easily out of it. The obsession with thin hasn’t helped this; add three or four mm to the thickness of my phone, it’ll make it easier to hold and give me better battery life.

I’ve written this on my smartphone and the one thing it’s taught me is how badly I’ve ruined the predictive text with lazy thumb movement.

I was invited to take part in Scottish Friendly’s Payday Mayday challenge this January. Scottish Friendly is a British financial services group. Their mantra is to make investments more accessible to everyone.

January is a bit of a nightmare month generally, as most of us get paid just before Christmas, spend a good chunk of our salaries on Christmas (and the sales!), before having to survive January on a meagre pittance. It’s small wonder that apparently 44% of of people make a New Year’s resolution to spend less then.

We were challenged with reducing our discretionary spending by 25% (that’s after the mortgage, which is our biggest outgoing and not something we can change as it’s about as cheap as we can go, and other fixed costs!) and although that’s something that sounds daunting, we were up for the challenge.

There’s a bit in Terry Pratchett’s Mort where the titular character has to clean out the stables (it’s a parody of one of the 12 Labours of Hercules, but you probably guessed that), and Mort uses a tried and tested system to break down the task into smaller bits:

“After a while he got into the rhythm of it, and started playing the privet little quantity-surveying game that everyone plays in these circumstances. Let’s see, he thought, I’ve done nearly a quarter, lets call it a third, so when I’ve done that corner by the hay rack it’ll be more than half, call it five-eights, which means three more wheelbarrow loads …. It doesn’t prove anything very much except that the awesome splendour of the universe is much easier to deal with if you think of it as a series of small chunks.”

Rather than baulking at the fact we’ve got to economise by hundreds of pounds, we decided to look at lots of little ways to save a few pounds here and there. So without further ado, here are my top tricks and tips for saving and cutting out that unnecessary spending.

Firstly we took the time to install the Hertfordshire County Library app on our iPads and tablets. Most counties do something like this as part of the library service but they don’t advertise it very well. As you can see the choice of magazines you can borrow is staggering, and given that magazines can cost £5.99 and more each, this has probably saved us over £30 a month on casual magazine purchases. A small step but one that takes us in the right direction.

Secondly, and one that appeals directly to my DIY ethos, we’ve made a pact to ditch all those coffee shop coffees. I got a bean grinder from my parents for Christmas (although if you want to buy one, it’s only the cost of a few Americanos). If you’re addicted to say your Starbucks, you can actually buy the beans in the supermarket (£3.55 for 200g of Starbucks house blend medium Arabica coffee). 50g of beans is enough to make a litre of coffee, so 200g should get you about 4 litres of coffee. A tall coffee is 350ml, and costs £1.95. Your £3.55 of beans can make 11 cups of “tall” coffee, against the coffee shops price of £21.45. That’s a saving of almost £18 for ever 11 coffees you make at home! If you pick up a coffee every day on the way to work, that’s going to save you about £35 a month per person, and a lot of time queuing!

Encouraged by the fact I can now sip a freshly home-brewed coffee as I walk through the sleet and snow to work, we decided to move on to the other big daily cost, lunch. Neither of us particularly ever made a packed lunch, preferring to grab a meal deal or something that tickles our fancy. That’s £3-£6 each every working day, and that soon adds up over the course of a month- £120-£240 for the pair of us. This is it chaps! The opportunity to save a huge wodge of cash!

Enter Hugh “Fearlessly Eat It All” Fearnley-Whittingstall. A quick look on the River Cottage website showed his DIY pot noodles. They looked absolutely yummy, and about as dirt cheap as you can get to make. Yes, actual Pot Noodles aren’t expensive but they’re not filling either, these DIY ones can be big enough to constitute an actual meal and leave me deciding on a sandwich for tea. Some sliced carrot, spring onions, cabbage, chilli, ginger and (obviously) noodles are we were good to go. The cost was minimal, especially once we’d twigged stopping off at the market on the way home.

That’s three changes we made and we’re already over £300 a month up (and at best £350), without having to ruin the kids (or our) quality of life either!

The biggy that I wasn’t sure I was ready to make though was losing my gym membership. It’s increasingly difficult to go enough to get value for money as the kids have so many clubs and activities they go to. Even though it was our local authority gym and I get a discount through work, making it less than half the price of some of the premium gyms in the area, it was still £40 a month. I’ve made a promise to myself to do the four mile round trip to work on foot and have installed Couch 2 5K on my phone (as well as Runkeeper) and I’ve got my 9 year old daughter training me. It’s a good bit of father daughter time, even if she has to constantly stop to let me catch up!

So there you go, four changes, almost £400 a month saved. The trick will now be keeping up with it, otherwise I’ll have to cancel my sports TV package to make up the difference, and if anyone ever needed an incentive, that would be it!

AXA PPP healthcare are launching a new campaign called Own Your Fears, looking at the way we can use our fears in a positive way to motivate us to change the way we live for the better. While fear is a natural instinct, we needn’t ‘fear’ fear or let it hold us back. If only there was a way to positively harness these fears and use them as a springboard into something better…

I can vividly reminding lying in my bed at the parents when I was ten or eleven, the realisation that my parents were mortal and one day would die striking me with such force it was almost akin to a physical blow. I’d been on the Junior Four (year six in new money) activity week at Butlins on Barry Island, back in the day when there was a Butlins on Barry Island*, it was the first time I’d been away from home and I missed my mum. When I came home they seemed older than I remembered, and it had me worried.

The only good thing to come out of the Phantom Menace was Yoda’s comments on fear:

Fear is the path to the dark side…fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering

It can control you if you decide to let it.

Lets not.

I might not be ten or eleven now, in fact I’m actually 43 but in a funny way things have come full circle in terms of fear of a loved one dying. I’ve now three children and a lovely wife (or is that three lovely children and a wife? Probably both, just to be on the safe side) and my thoughts have turned more frequently to what would happen to my little family if I suddenly die. Part of this has been precipitated by both our sets of parents getting older, and in the case of my parents, battling illness, part of it by the realisation that my epiphany of mortality that struck me as a child happened at exactly the same age that my eldest is now.

I had a minor health scare myself last year that saw me get a ECG to ensure that the hyper-mobility I’d be diagnosed with hadn’t affected my heart. It hadn’t but there’s nothing like a heart scare to act as a wake up call is there? Every 40 something that works in an office environment, has three children and a wife is probably carrying a few extra pounds- offices are sedentary places, kids drive you to comfort eat and wives cook lovely lovely food- and things like that, along with the advancing years don’t help allay the fear.

I’m lucky in a sense that my family wouldn’t be financially ruined if I passed away tonight. There is enough in life assurance and death in service payouts to ensure that the mortgage would be paid off and my family would have about 5 years worth of my wife’s salary left over. The thing that causes me genuine gut wrenching fear is the idea that my family would be bereaved and have to live without me. That sounds a bit big headed but I found it difficult dealing with the death of my grandparents a few years ago and we weren’t even that close. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose a parent in your formative years. It certainly never seems to go well in those gritty Channel 4 dramas when that sort of thing happens.

Our littlest wouldn’t have me there to cling to my leg and whimper “I want Dadda” whenever I take him to a party round a friends house that he’s been to hundreds of times. My daughter wouldn’t have me there is give her a cuddle and tell her she’s brilliant when girl playground politics get too much for her. My eldest wouldn’t have someone to nod in (feigned) understanding when he talks incessantly about Warhammer. And my wife would be stuck if the router needed rebooting. Parenting is hard, I find it incredibly difficult at times, and I know I’d struggle without my awesome wife there, so I sort of figure that more or less the reverse is probably true (it might not be, she does make it look easy at times).

I have a choice, I can comfort eat my way through this fear, putting it to the back of my mind and having another bacon and egg muffin, or a I can face it, use it to motivate and empower myself and make a difference. People, it’s time to make a difference.

It’s too easy to make New Year Resolutions and then watch fatalistically as they slide when real life gets in the way. Besides, my kids aren’t going to feel safer if I tell them I’ve been out running a bit and my lower back aches as a result. No, to do this properly I’m going to have to enlist my family to help, give them joint ownership of Project Me, and trust that they can help me see this through. After all, we’re all in this together aren’t we?

I’m aiming to get fit and involve my family in getting me fit. I might exceed the weight limit for the mini trampoline we’ve got by a third (75KG maximum!) but that doesn’t stop me putting Eye of the Tiger on and doing my own training montage of press ups, sit ups and running on the spot, with one or more children either joining in or shouting encouragement (or insults). Nobody is immortal but being fit can help me live longer with a better quality of life.

I’m lucky of course that it’s fairly easy once you get over the initial hurdle of embracing it, to tackle a rational fear like your own mortality. Irrational fears are harder to tackle but AXA PPP healthcare can help you there too, as articles like this one on resilience show.

As I begin my journey, inspired by AXA PPP healthcare, they’re going to provide resources, like their Own Your Fears microsite, and support to me, to top up what my family can do. Together we can ensure that my kids won’t have to face the same worries about their parents dying that I faced, and I can harness the positive aspects of the fear of leaving them all to fend for themselves in the big mean world…

*it actually closed after Christmas that very year. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

I'm Alex, the daddy to three nippers. The boy is 10 and the lass who is eight but is often mistaken for his (non identical) twin. On New Years Day 2012, Ned (AKA Danger-it's his middle name) joined us, so now we're a family of five!

I'm married to wifey, who writes beingamummy.co.uk. I used to be a bit rubbish at blogging but since my entire office get massive doses of what the little 'uns get up to, I thought it was time to blog. That was over 7 years ago...

Hosted with

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.